Review article: Machiavelli, Philosophy and Social Conflict

Filippo Del Lucchese is the author of the best comparative study of Machiavelli and Spinoza to date, entitled Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation(London, 2009). Together with a group of Italian historians of political thought such as Fabio Frosini, Vittorio Morfino and Stefano Visentin, he has edited several volumes of collected essays on early modern political philosophy, including the recent The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy and Language(Leiden, 2015). These works advance a reading of Machiavelli as the point of origin of an arc that passes through Spinoza and reaches up to Marx, composing what Antonio Negr icalled an ‘alternative modernity’ that proposes a radical, as opposed to a liberal form of democracy. Although they do not form a school, the hermeneutics of this working group shares the following assumptions: the priority of social conflict over political order; the dependence of politics on ontology; an idea of ‘political philosophy’ that is not context-bound; a reading of modernity as a revolutionary process; and, last but not least, the adoption of a ‘realist’ approach to politics, where force is always the ultimate deciding factor and the consequent rejection of ‘utopian’ or ‘messianic’ approaches to revolutionary activity.